War Stories: Why I Lit Up Lytro

I bought a Lytro Illum to play with 3D pictures, which id did quite well on smaller scale objects. I have beautiful roses to show for it on my 3d Samsung TV.

Unexpectedly to me, it turned out to be very useful for a different purpose.

With a regular camera you have plenty of megapixels, so in post-production you can crop left and right. This allows you to learn how to frame your shots well via rapid iteration. Had you not had the megapixel surplus, you would have to make new shots to iterate on your framing technique, and that would take a lot longer.

While Lytro is lacking in megapixels, it can serve the same purpose with respect to depth of field. You can take hundreds of photos with a regular camera honing your DOF skills, or you can just play with it in post-production and very quickly see how it changes the overall picture.

Had they shipped their third-generation camera, it would allow to do both, making it an indispensable photography training tool.

It's sad that they had to wrap it up, but I wish them the best of luck with that VR thing.

Various stories posted to HN in 2015 for context:

http://recode.net/2015/02/25/lytro-cuts-jobs-raises-50-milli...

http://www.fastcompany.com/3042910/tech-forecast/seven-sober...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513295 http://uploadvr.com/lytro-immerge-vr-light-field-video-camer...

http://www.wired.com/2015/11/lytro-refocuses-to-create-a-gro...

I had so much fun with my (original) Lytro camera. For about a month. Then the novelty wore off and it just became a slightly difficult-to-use camera that often took pictures where none of the 10 focal lengths it offered gave a crisp rendition of the subject. So much for "focusing the picture after the fact."

So I thought, hey, that's too bad, but maybe this would be a really great platform for experimenting with computer vision! Or at least I could dig into the file and look for other interesting things to do with the light field photos.

Unfortunately, no dice. The thing is not-at-all hackable - at least at the time, they hadn't posted any specs on their file format or specs for the protocol it uses to talk to the computer. If they had, it might have had a serious 2nd life as a toy for makers. Instead, my unit has gone untouched for at least the past 18 months.

Considering how quickly I lost interest in it for general photography uses, I never even considered buying the Illum. The things it does differently from a regular camera are, by and large, things a decent photographer doesn't really want.

So a consumer product was never going to happen, and even if they had scratched my itch and make a toy for hackers, it would have penned them into a very small niche market in the absolute best case scenario. He made the right choice.

I'd missed their new product launch. That thing is very cool, and potentially a better use of their light-field imaging than their camera-like projects.

You guys have a Seattle office?

Somewhat OT: if you write a blog post about a company (or product, etc.), please provide a link to the company in the first paragraph.

I know it's trivial to google, but it's still very annoying. I see this here all too often. E.g. many companies have their blog at blog.example.com but no obvious link anywhere to example.com. It's just a huge oversight.

So, out of courtesy: https://www.lytro.com/

Summary? And is the article worth the time?